


The Cat in the Hat Comes Back

by kittykatthetacodemon



Series: Fundamentals [3]
Category: The Losers (2010), The Losers (Comic), The Losers - All Media Types
Genre: Character Death Fix, Fix-It, M/M, Spoilers for the comics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-23
Updated: 2015-08-23
Packaged: 2018-04-16 20:45:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4639599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittykatthetacodemon/pseuds/kittykatthetacodemon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Cat in the Hat Comes Back - it's goddamn Seussical, that's what it is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> FYI: This won't make any sense if you haven't read the comics, or already spoiled the ending for yourself. Don't read if you don't want spoilers.
> 
> As soon as I read the comics, I knew I was going to end up writing this. Spoilers for the end of the comics, and (eventually) making the obvious fix. In my head, this fits into the movie canon, the comic canon, and my own personal fic headcanon.

There were a few moments after the bomb went off where Jensen legitimately did not understand what was happening. He shouted, but he couldn’t hear it, because the world had whited out and there was a roaring and rattling like a million freight trains passing by at once. And then the chopper went down and he and Pooch were too busy trying to recover—failing to recover—and bailing out while they were still over the water, watching the helicopter flutter away into the distance like a dying bird, trailing smoke all the way.

And then they were alone in the water, only a quarter mile from shore, and Jensen had to swim back to solid land knowing that the nuke had gone off, knowing what Cougar must have done.

He was pretty certain that he preferred those few moments of confusion, everything going to pieces around him, when he thought that _he_ was the dead one and not Cougar.

* * *

So Clay was dead and gone, and probably Aisha and Max, too, for the second time. Even that particular cockroach couldn’t have survived a nuclear blast. He wished he could be happy about that, at least—all the time and energy spent, all the blood shed—but all he could think about was Cougar.

_Fuck, Cougar_ —even with the brief window of time it would have taken for the nuke to overload, Cougar wasn’t going anywhere after being shot twice in the chest. He must have planned it, bought Jensen just enough time to get free before starting the countdown to set it off, and it _hurt_ that he hadn’t waited just a little longer. There was no way in hell that he had survived, nothing that Jensen could have done—been smarter, faster, _better_ —to change what had happened.

He was dead. He had died alone. These facts were incontrovertible—every bit of evidence and logic pointed to it—but Jensen refused to believe it anyway, because until he believed it, it wasn’t true.

* * *

He and Pooch split up almost immediately. Pooch went back to his family, which was good, was as it should be, and Jensen set in motion plans that he had set up ages before, plans to erase himself so well and disappear so completely that it would be like he had simply ceased to exist.

It was a good thing that he had planned ahead, because he was able to do everything on autopilot, and ignore the fact that all his plans had been made for two.

Pooch had tried to convince Jensen to go back home with him, and then, when that had failed, had made him promise that they would meet up in exactly a year, a reunion of sorts for the last two surviving Losers. Jensen got the feeling that Pooch was worried about him, was afraid Jensen would do something stupid now that—since Cougar was—wasn’t—just _wasn’t_ , anymore. There was a sort of numbness that Jensen was still riding, a lack-of-feeling that let him move and breathe and speak even though the world had ended, but beyond that, no matter what came, Pooch didn’t have any real reason to worry.

Cougar had given him those ten minutes, had waited for him to get clear. If it really was the last thing Cougar had ever done, it would kill him to throw it away—in more ways than one.

* * *

He was coming _back_ ; he had told Cougar he was _coming back_. And if only the bastard had waited a little longer—

He didn’t fucking know how to do this by himself. In all his plans, all his fail-safes and emergency exits, Cougar had been there, too, and now nothing made sense and it was all _his fucking fault_ , that fucking _asshole_ —he had _lied_ , and Jensen kept replaying that last conversation over and over again in his mind and wondering why he had let himself ignore the fact that every word they had said was screaming _goodbye, goodbye, goodbye_.

* * *

There was a month or so where Jensen locked himself into a shithole rent-a-cabin in Bumfuck Nowhere, Alaska, and got so shitfaced drunk that he could have easily killed himself without realizing it. He didn’t have to worry about being on the grid. He had no cell phone, no computer, nothing but what untraceable cash could get him—an unused house, a stockpile of food, and enough booze to last a lifetime.

When he drank enough, the whole thing, the whole shitstorm, didn’t just disappear—he never would have stopped drinking if it had. But it was easier, somehow—everything dulled down and rounded out, until he could turn the thing over in his mind and try to come to terms with all the sharp edges that would cut him to pieces when he was sober. He drank until he was sick and then drank some more, came to without realizing he had passed out and watched the ceiling spin above him to the slow and ponderous beating of his heart, the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed.

Cougar would have disapproved. Cougar would have hauled him up off the floor and dragged him kicking and screaming back to sobriety, would have monitored his heartbeat and breathing and left out pointed, passive-aggressive pamphlets about alcohol poisoning, would have slammed every door he went through the next morning and refused to bring him water or aspirin.

Jensen would have taken it all if it meant Cougar would be there just once when he woke up, painfully hungover and still alone.

* * *

But there was a point where enough had to be enough—a point where Jensen looked around at his room full of empty bottles and hated it, hated himself. He couldn’t remember for sure the last time he had been sober enough to notice or to care, and that was distantly disturbing, more so because of how disturbing it _wasn’t._

He wanted to care. He didn't.

He cleaned it out, grabbed what little he could carry, and got the hell out of there as fast as he could.

He had been out of the world for too long. The next few months were a whirlwind of movement, because if he kept moving he had to be sober enough to keep it together, to make sure that there was no one on his trail and no one who could keep up with him even if they were. From some lingering sense of paranoia, he burned through laptops like chewing gum, leaving pieces of them scattered across motel floors and under park benches, tossed off empty overpasses in the hours between midnight and dawn. Every once in a while he imagined that someone was following him—some sixth sense, movement out of the corner of his eye—but there was never anything to find when he went looking, and he took it as a sign that he had been in one place for too long and moved on.

He went to places he’d never been before, places he’d been to and wanted to see again, places he’d been to and hated, places where no one would expect him to go. It was strange, spending time in Africa, in Asia and the Middle East, where he didn’t speak the languages and looked constantly out of place—pale white skin and bright blond hair stood out, and with his height and his glasses he became something recognizable and far, far too memorable. He never stayed in any one place for very long, paranoia itching like a target between his shoulder blades.

Europe was better—plenty of people, places to go, and he could blend in pretty easily there, just another American tourist moving from England to Germany, to Poland and then to France. From there he touched on Spain for only a day before jumping on a flight to Italy, instead, where the food was just as good and he could actually breathe.

And if Italian didn’t make him twitch, didn’t make him look over his shoulder every time a man started to speak the way that Spanish had, then there was no one around to say anything about it.

He avoided America altogether, and didn’t even pretend to rationalize it to himself.

* * *

When he met up with Pooch it was—it was a relief, honestly, to see that if nothing else there was still someone else who knew who he was and what he had lost, what they had both lost. And yeah, it sucked that Clay was gone—Clay had taken them all in and given them a place to be themselves, had taken a bunch of losers and made a team that could save the world.

But Cougar had been Cougar, and Jensen had been a part of Cougar-and-Jensen for so long that it was still hard to separate the two in his own head. He could see Pooch doing it, too, glancing to the empty spaces, waiting just a half-second too long for responses that weren’t going to come.

So when Stegler came, with his fucking _job offer_ —a glorified death sentence—it was easier than it should have been to tell him to fuck off, and he knew Pooch was right there with him. They had done enough. He could imagine the way Cougar would have smirked under his hat, and it—it almost didn’t hurt, remembering him like that, with the stupid hat and the stupid smirk and the stupid everything that Jensen missed about him. As long as Jensen remembered him there was something of him left, even if he was dead. Cougar was dead.

It sounded like grief and like acceptance when he said it out loud for the first time—“My best friend died with a bomb in his lap,”—and he hadn’t realized that he had never had a chance to say it, to talk about it with anyone who knew. His voice didn’t even shake.

Pooch said goodbye to him at the airport, made plans to meet up again in a few months in another place, somewhere that Stegler wouldn’t follow. Pooch didn’t ask Jensen to go with him, and Jensen took that to mean that Pooch felt okay about him on his own this time, that Pooch wasn’t worried that he would eat his gun or something in a fit of existential despair.

And, okay, maybe he _could_ do this on his own, not that he wanted to. But he could. He could muddle through, figure out something to do with his life, and he could—be okay, maybe, if not alright.

It would have to be enough.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Sure, Cougar was quickly bleeding to death, and sure, there was an armed nuke set to detonate behind him, but he was a sniper, a survivor, always had been—he had done everything that he could for the mission, and if there was still a shot, he was going to take it.
> 
> He had maybe five minutes. He had done a hell of a lot more with a hell of a lot less."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now to the actual fix! This is where it totally diverges from canon.

In the end, dying hurt more than Cougar had thought it would.

He had thought—hoped—that it would be peaceful.  There were so many things that he had done, things he had seen that he wanted to forget, and there were times when dying had seemed so—simple.  Like he was carrying a heavy load, and he would get to put that down once and for all.  He had hoped he would feel lighter, knowing it was all coming to an end.

Except there was Jensen.  Jake.  So he lied, said he would wait for Jensen to come back, because he had to, and it got Jensen clear—he couldn’t let Jensen die if he could prevent it, the only rule he would never let himself break—and then he rigged the fucking nuclear bomb in his lap to explode.

Because _fuck_ Max, and those little ones would never get their lives back but the least he could do was make sure Max paid for it—and if fire and bullets wouldn’t do it, then a nuke certainly would.

No one had ever accused the Losers of _under_ kill.

So he prepped the bomb the way Jensen had showed him to, hoped he had done it right, hoped it would be enough, and waited for it to overload.

And then he stopped himself, because—he didn’t know why, actually, just knew that he couldn’t just sit and wait for death.  He had spent time believing that Jensen was dead, and there was no way in hell he would wish the reverse on Jensen.

Death like this wouldn’t be peace.  It would be selfishness.

So he clawed himself to his feet, blood and bullets and all, and climbed into the goddamn pipe.  Sure, he was quickly bleeding to death, and sure, there was an armed nuke set to detonate behind him, but he was a sniper, a survivor, always had been—he had done everything that he could for the mission, and if there was still a shot, he was going to _take it_.

He had maybe five minutes.  He had done a hell of a lot more with a hell of a lot less.

* * *

Still, waking up in the hospital had honestly been a surprise.  It was less surprising that he had no memory of how he had done it—rescue ships had found him in the water just clear of the blast zone, the only survivor, and he knew he had to have swum through the pipe, must have pulled himself along inch by agonizing inch, but it was all a blur and maybe it was better that he couldn’t remember, anyway.

He let them think he had amnesia, because it was easier than trying to explain.

The doctor told him what had been done—the blood loss, the internal injuries, the collapsed lung, the damage from two bullets that had been pulled from his chest and one from his leg—and it was only then that it really hit him that he had _done it_ , that it was over.  Max was dead and he had lived, and he was _free_.

“We could not find any identification or emergency contact information, sir, but we did find this,” the doctor said in heavily accented English, and reached down at the foot of the bed to bring up—

Fucking _unbelievable_.  Cougar burst out laughing and couldn’t make it stop, even though it pulled at his chest and the doctor was looking at him like he had gone crazy.

Maybe he had.  He must have, because it went beyond all logic and reason that after all that, after everything, he still had his fucking hat.

* * *

One thing that could be said about the Army—it had trained him to slip across borders undetected, a ghost of a man under the shadow of his hat, and he used that skill to get himself out of the Middle East.  It had been—fuck, it had been months since the explosion at New Jerusalem, months of healing and regaining his strength enough that he could slip out of the hospital in the middle of the night.

Jensen was long gone.  Word of mouth said that he and Pooch had gone down, died in a helicopter crash after the explosion, but their old safe house had been cleared and cleared well, and Cougar was starting to believe the Losers didn’t know _how_ to die.  Also, and more importantly, someone had marked the doorframe like the Losers always did on their way out—a signal to any stragglers that the others had come and gone.  It had to be either absentmindedness or wishful thinking, because surely Jensen and Pooch both thought that everyone else was dead.

So they were alive.  _He_ was alive.  It was nothing short of a miracle.

All that was left was to find Jensen and let him know that Cougar hadn’t actually died, though that was easier said than done.  Jensen might be a larger-than-life presence, a stand-out figure in any crowd, but if he wanted to disappear, he had the skill to do it more completely than anyone else on the planet.

Cougar had a place to start.  Jensen had made plans, redundancies on top of redundancies, and even having an idea in advance where he ought to look, it still took Cougar a fairly ridiculous amount of luck and almost two months more to follow the faintest trail of crappy camera footage and word-of-mouth.  The trail moved along a circuitous route through the busiest port towns in Asia and Africa, across the ocean to Canada, and, eventually, to a one bedroom shack in Alaska.

The place had been stripped clean— _too_ clean, like the previous occupant had systematically erased every trace of his presence, of _any_ presence.

That was where the trail went cold.  He would have thought he was in the wrong place altogether, except there was that little mark on the doorframe, right where it ought to be.

Cougar didn’t believe in coincidences.  Jensen had been there, and he was too late.

* * *

Cougar had contacts around the world, just like the rest of them had, but he tracked Jensen without their help.  It was better to be careful, to make sure he wouldn’t tip off the CIA or anyone else who might be looking for hints that the Losers had survived one last time.  Jensen moved _constantly_ , hopping from major city to major city and country to country with the slightest change in the wind, and Cougar was already so many steps behind.  It was a hopeless exercise, so he picked a city in Europe and just _waited_.  If Jensen stuck to his pattern, at some point he would come close enough that Cougar could pick up his trail again.

Madrid was hot and bright, a riot of sounds and smells, but Cougar could blend in enough to get by, could change his accent from Mexican to Castilian so perfectly that even the natives wouldn’t know the difference.  He had only been there a week, staking out a café where he could keep an eye on the busy marketplace, when some instinct had him looking up and over to the end of the street.

His heart leapt into his throat.  There was a very familiar head, a familiar shock of blond hair, on a man tall enough that he was easily visible over most of the crowd; the man turned, and Cougar could see the glint of sunlight off a pair of round lenses.

He was up and moving before he could think, sudden enough that he startled the people sitting at the tables around him.  The sidewalks were too crowded for him to run, but he felt like he would be running if he could, hopeful and fearful in equal measure until he felt like he would vibrate out of his skin, heart pounding in his ears.  He felt more alive than he had felt in—in nearly a year, _God_ , and he wasn’t sure if what he was feeling in the pit of his stomach was anticipation or terror.

Jensen was gone by the time Cougar reached the corner, as if he’d never been there at all.  Cougar hadn’t even had a chance to call out.

He felt like he was shaking, but his hands were, as always, perfectly steady.

* * *

So Jensen was impossible to track, but Pooch was not.  Pooch had a wife, had a family, and there was no way that Jolene would have let him rattle aimlessly between countries and continents like Jensen was doing.

It was nothing short of stupid that it had taken him so long to think this through, but he had always had a one-track mind, laser-like focus—and Jensen was still, always, his first thought.  So it was almost a year to the day since his supposed _death_ that he found Pooch, in an out-of-the-way house in the middle of nowhere.

And that was the point where Cougar flinched.  He couldn’t bring himself to go up to the front door, to dig himself up out of the grave again, and it had nothing to do with not knowing what to say—Cougar had never been much for words, anyway, and Pooch wouldn’t have cared.  He just—he couldn’t, and he had never been a coward before but he thought he might be one now.

So he just watched, and tried to work up the courage.  Pooch looked _happy_ , that was the thing.  He was packing to go somewhere, and he just kept smiling at Jolene and the kids—happy to be there, happy to be alive.

He stayed, watching the house, when Pooch left, and it was only a day after he had gone that Cougar remembered that it was the anniversary of his supposed death, that Pooch had probably gone to _meet up with Jensen_ —another stupid mistake, another missed opportunity.

He was still beating himself up over that when he first noticed the surveillance on the house, some still-active instinct that let him recognize that he wasn’t the only one keeping an eye on Pooch’s family.  With Pooch gone it seemed that someone had gotten bold.

While he hadn’t planned to reveal himself, the matter was taken out of his hands altogether when he watched a man—dark hair, dark clothes, shifty expression—just an everyday household robber, then, not some CIA stooge—attempt to break into Pooch’s house.

Jolene and the kids were inside.  Cougar couldn’t allow that.

He ghosted into the house only a few steps behind the other man, and when he was distracted, clocked him over the head with the butt of his gun.

Of course he was armed.  He just didn’t think Jolene would appreciate blood all over her floors.

The man fell with a heavy-sounding _thump_ , and in the expectant silence afterward Cougar thought about ghosting out the door just as silently as he had come in, with no one the wiser.  But if he had come this far—

It was more than time to stand his ground.

Footsteps started down the stairs, and Cougar put his gun away and made sure to stand with his hands in full view.  Sure enough, when the lights clicked on, there was Jolene at the bottom of the steps, shotgun in hand—and Cougar didn’t doubt she was ready and willing to use it, too.

They looked at each other for a minute, Jolene’s eyes roving up and down, taking him in, and then the unconscious body on the ground behind him.  Cougar wondered, amused, what she was thinking.  “Take off the hat,” Jolene ordered at last, shotgun still at the ready.

Cougar did, held it in his right hand.  Jolene’s eyes zeroed in on his, recognition clear on her face, and Cougar could still see her considering and discarding a hundred responses.

At last the shotgun went down, the shoulders slumped.  “You’re supposed to be dead,” she said.

Cougar considered that and shrugged, very deliberately.

“Yeah, I should have known better,” she said, rueful.  “You took your time, you know.  What do you have to say for yourself?”

Cougar opened his mouth, closed it, cleared his throat, and tried again.  “Sorry I’m late,” he managed.

* * *

Pooch came home to find a dead man sitting at his kitchen table, drinking his coffee.

Jolene had planned to warn him before springing Cougar on him, but Jolene was still in bed, sleeping in after a night spent helping Cougar hogtie their unwanted intruder and carry him out the quarter mile to the nearest road, where he could work his way free and then walk home.  Somehow, Cougar doubted he would try this particular house again.

So Cougar was alone in the kitchen when Pooch came through the front door.  He tensed when the key rattled in the lock, but managed to forcibly relax by the time Pooch saw the lights down the hallway and started coming toward him.

“Hey, Jo, I’m back—” Pooch started to say, loud in the quiet of the house, and then stopped dead in the doorway.  His bags dropped limply to the floor, unchecked, and Cougar very carefully, very deliberately, set his mug down on the table before he looked up.

He didn’t want to meet Pooch’s eyes, but Pooch would want to see his face, so he reached up and tipped the brim of his hat back, so his eyes cleared its shade.  “ _Hola_ , Pooch,” he said, and tried out a smile.

“Oh, you son of a _bitch_ ,” Pooch said, and lunged.

He flinched back, but Pooch just grabbed him by the front of the shirt and yanked him forward, up and off the chair, and there was a frozen second where the chair clattered to the ground and Cougar wasn’t sure whether Pooch was going to punch him or not, but then Pooch started to smile and it was probably going to be alright.

Jolene came downstairs, drawn by the noise, just in time to see Pooch dragging a not-all-that-reluctant Cougar into a hug.

* * *

Later, when questions had been asked and answered, Cougar sat on Pooch’s living room couch with a beer and watched his teammate out of the corner of his eye.

There hadn’t been any shouting.  All in all, it was a better reaction than he had been expecting, but then again, all the Losers had experience in coming back from the dead.

He didn’t know how to ask what he needed to ask.  Pooch knew him better than that, though—and wasn’t that a novelty, after a year of being nameless, faceless, a dead man walking.  “Spit it out, man,” Pooch said, though he didn’t sound unsympathetic.

Cougar couldn’t.  The sheer magnitude of it all—everything he needed to know—had tied his tongue in knots.  “How—I mean, what is he—”  He gave up and looked over at Pooch, helpless.

Pooch put down his own beer, and didn’t waste time pretending not to know what he meant.  “He’s not great, but he’s doing okay, man,” he said quietly.  “He’s missed you.  Hell, _I_ missed you, you asshole, but you and I both know that’s not the same.  What, did you think he’d be doing cartwheels?  Setting off fireworks?  Damn, Cougs, were _you_?”

Wordless, Cougar shook his head.

“Yeah,” Pooch said.  “That’s what I thought.”

“I tried,” Cougar said, tongue thick in his mouth.  “I tried to find him.”

Pooch shook his head, leaned forward so he could rummage through his pockets and pull out a piece of paper that he held out, shaking it a little until Cougar took it from him.

It was an address, a date, handwritten in Jensen’s messy scrawl.  Cougar heard the paper crinkle as his hand tightened on it involuntarily.

“Don’t tell me, man,” Pooch said.  “Tell him.”

* * *

The date was almost three months later, and the address was a little dive bar in Tijuana, the sort of place a man like Stegler—who screamed government no matter how hard he tried—couldn’t go without attracting all kinds of attention.

Cougar wasn’t sure how he felt about doing this in public.  On the one hand, it would keep Jensen from panicking and shooting him on the spot, but on the other, there were some reactions that just wouldn’t be appropriate in a public place.

Cougar didn’t let himself hope.  He hadn’t let himself hope for over a year, and he wasn’t about to start.

He had meant to get to the rendezvous point early, to maybe catch Jensen outside, but he delayed and delayed— _coward_ , still—and ended up walking in ten minutes late instead.  His eyes locked on Jensen immediately.  He was hard to miss—he was at the bar, a glass of something vivid and green in hand, gesturing widely as he attempted to explain something in broken Spanglish to the bemused-looking bartender.  The other patrons were giving him a wide berth, and Cougar could understand why—in his reflection in the mirror above the bar, Cougar could see he was wearing his green-tinted glasses, his pink Petunias shirt, and his widest grin, the one that made Cougar start to think about exit strategies and made his trigger finger itch for his rifle.

Cougar loved him so much it hurt.

He felt his lips curve up, smiling without meaning to, and something he hadn’t even realized he was missing settled into the pit of his stomach, comforting and warm.  He slid through the crowd carefully until at last he could pause, think, slip onto the barstool next to Jensen and wait.

Jensen glanced at him out of the corner of his eye, dismissed him as a threat, and then did a visible double take, his drink sloshing a little onto the top of the bar.

“ _Hola_ , Jake,” Cougar said, smiling at him, because inane as it was it needed to be said.

“Hello,” Jensen said faintly, his eyes going huge behind his glasses.  “Um.  This is not—I mean, what?  How is this—?”  He closed his mouth, eyed his drink suspiciously, and then opened it again.  “I must be seeing things.  Excuse me.”  He put his drink down and turned very definitely away, back toward the bartender, who was watching the whole exchange.  “Yeah, see, I’m aware this is going to sound a little crazy,” he began, which was never a good start, “but, uh, can you see him?”  He pointed with a thumb toward Cougar, and the bartender’s eyes flicked toward Cougar and then back, one eyebrow slowly climbing.  “He’s dead, okay, so I need you to tell me if I’m losing my mind.”

The bartender stared at Jensen, and then looked over at Cougar, who shrugged.

“I can see him,” he said slowly, in lightly accented English.  “And he doesn’t look very dead to me.”

“Great, thanks,” Jensen said, and then suddenly turned into a blur of motion, slamming some cash down on the bar and grabbing Cougar by the wrist, dragging him off his stool and toward the door.

Cougar let himself be dragged.  Outside, the air was chill and a little damp, the stars just beginning to show in the night sky, but Cougar wasn’t looking at that, was too busy being yanked around the corner of the alley beside the bar.  There, Jensen suddenly spun him around and pushed him up against the bricks, back to the wall and Jensen’s arm a solid bar against his throat—not pushing down, just present.  His hat was pushed off and fell to the ground; Jensen watched it go, but judging by the look in his eyes he wasn’t actually watching it, had gone—elsewhere.

He looked wild.  He looked _wrecked_.  Cougar just looked at him, and waited.

Eventually Jensen looked up and met his eyes, seemed to realize he was pinning Cougar against the wall.  He pushed away, back a few steps into the shadows, and Cougar could have moved away, could have moved closer, and instead stayed exactly where he was, let Jensen set the terms.

“Holy fuck,” Jensen said, confused and surprised, the first thing he had said since leaving the bar.  Then again, “Holy _fuck_ ,” and this time his tone was painful, unpleasant.  “Shit!”  He ran his hands through his hair, covered his eyes, and Cougar felt a pull in his gut like a physical need, wanting to reach out and knowing he shouldn’t, not yet.  He stayed put.  “Fuck, you— _fuck_.  You died, you— _you’re supposed to be dead_.”

“I’m not,” Cougar offered, everything and nothing, all at once.

“I can see that,” Jensen said, laughed, hysterical.  “Holy shit, it’s been—it’s been fifteen months, and I was—I thought—and you’ve been alive this _whole time_?”

Cougar didn’t have an answer, but Jensen didn’t seem to be waiting for one.

“Oh, god, fuck,” Jensen said, and now his tone was slipping from shock to something a little angrier.  “You’ve been alive this whole time.  For fifteen months.  You _fucking asshole_.  What the _fuck_ , man?”

He paused.  The silence stretched just a second too long before Cougar realized maybe he was supposed to answer this time.  “Jensen, I—”

“No, stop, don’t say another word,” Jensen cut in,definitely angry now, and Cougar couldn’t see his face but he could see the way he was shaking all over, his hands curling into tight fists.  Maybe this was some kind of karma—telling Pooch had gone so well that this was destined to crash and burn.  Jensen sounded furious.  Jensen sounded like this was _killing_ him.  “I am so fucking pissed at you right now.  You _lied_.  You lied to me and let me leave you there with a fucking _nuclear bomb_ and then you _died_ , do you understand?  You died and left me alone, and I fucking _mourned_ for you, okay, and—and do you even know what that did to me?”

Cougar could guess.

“And then you—what the hell am I supposed to do with _this_?”  He gestured at Cougar, alive and watching him.  Silent, because there wasn’t anything he could say.  “You’ve been alive the whole time, and you never—fuck you.  Just— _fuck you_.  I can’t even look at you.”

He was right to be angry.  It _had_ been a lie, at the time—Cougar hadn’t meant to survive, had only tried, and had been lucky one last time.  _Jensen_ had been forced to live with that decision, and then Cougar had finally had a chance to catch up to him and he had been too much of a coward, had let another three months slip by.

A lot could happen in a year.  Jensen could have moved on.  Jensen could have—fuck, could have been happier without him, no matter what Pooch had said.  Maybe this had just opened up scars that had healed over, and it was just Cougar being stupid, being selfish, and desperately wanting to see Jensen one last time.

Maybe it would have been easier if he really _had_ died.

Jensen turned away, and Cougar felt—cold.  He stayed put, frozen for an infinitely long moment, until Jensen sighed and turned around to face him again, and this was it, this was the moment when Jensen told him to leave.  “Maybe I shouldn’t—” he tried to say, but the words died on his tongue.  He cleared his throat.  “I can go,” he managed at last, and it actually physically hurt to say, but it was better than hearing Jensen say it instead. 

Jensen just looked at him, and Cougar still couldn’t make out the expression on his face, but he didn’t protest, and Cougar felt something inside him—break, jagged and wrong, like a literal broken bone.

The words dragged themselves out of him.  “I’ll go.”  He pushed off the wall and went to walk away, jerky and slow, reluctant all the way down to his bones.

But he only got a step forward before Jensen lunged for him, grabbing his wrist and holding onto it so tightly that Cougar could almost feel the bones grind together.  The force of the movement sent them both stumbling backward, until Cougar was once again pressed against the brick wall.  “ _No_ ,” Jensen said, abruptly desperate, and didn’t let go.  “Fuck, no, don’t you dare.”

Cougar breathed out, a slow sigh of relief.

Jensen shook his head, tightened his grip on Cougar’s wrist, and, to Cougar’s surprise, leaned in closer, not father away.  “I don’t—”  He seemed to run out of words.

Jensen had been reading Cougar’s silences for so long that Cougar thought maybe it was his turn.  Jensen was caging Cougar in with his whole body, keeping him from moving, was scanning Cougar’s face like he was afraid this was some kind of trick, like Cougar would disappear between one blink and the next.  He didn’t look like he wanted Cougar to leave—he looked like he would break into pieces if Cougar went away again, like he was expecting it, and Cougar hated himself and loved this man with equal intensity.

There were a million things to say, a hundred thousand excuses and explanations—but Cougar didn’t say any of them.  He twisted his wrist free and brought his arms up between their bodies, ignoring the way Jensen splayed his hands out on the wall on either side of him, trapping him but not touching him.  All that mattered was reaching out, framing Jensen’s face between his hands.  “Jake,” he said, just that one word.  And then again, “Jake.”  Quietly, like it was the only word he knew.

Jensen’s face crumpled against his palms.  “ _Shit_ , Cougar,” he said, and he was crying, Cougar could feel the wetness against his fingertips.  “Cougs, Cougar, _shit_ —I can’t fucking believe it—”

He was breathing like he was choking on it, wrenching and horrible, and the only point of contact between them was where Jensen was pressing into Cougar’s hands, everything else held a careful distance apart.  Cougar leaned forward—slowly, slowly, giving Jensen plenty of time to see the movement—until he could press their foreheads together, breath mingling between them, and Cougar was crying now, too, couldn’t stop himself.

“Jake,” he said, too fast and raw, and if speaking was impossible before, then now it was impossible to stop.  He screwed his eyes shut and let the words come.  “Jake, _lo siento_.   _Lo siento_.  I’m sorry.  _Mierda_ , I tried to find you after— _quería encontrarte, quería decirte, lo prometo, lo juro, mi querido._ _Lo siento.  Perdóname.  Perdóname, por favor._ ”

Jensen twitched violently back in his grip, and Cougar shut his mouth on the pained sound that wanted to escape, opened his eyes and let him go.  But Jensen was just pulling back an inch, just enough to look at him.  He came back immediately, brought his arms around Cougar’s shoulders and hauled him away from the bricks, closing that last careful gap so they were pressed together and then they were kissing, desperate and together and alive, _alive_.

Jensen broke away to gasp, “Don’t you ever fucking do that to me again, I will _kill you myself_ , understand?” and Cougar dragged him back in, promised with teeth and tongue instead of words.

An indeterminate amount of time later—maybe minutes, maybe hours, who knew?—Jensen made a low sound, pulled away.  “Stop,” he said, “shit, Cougs, stop, we can’t do this,” and it took a minute for the words to process.

When they did, Cougar leapt back against the wall like he had been scalded.  He didn’t know what his face was doing, but Jensen took one look at him and made that low sound a second time, hauled him back in by his belt loops until they were flush against each other again.  “No!  No, god no, not like that.  Just—not here, okay?  We’re in the middle of a goddamn alley.”

Cougar glanced around—and, oh, right, they were, and they could hardly continue the way they had been out in the open like this.  Even Mexico had public decency laws.

He took a step away—Jensen swayed toward him, like a snake—and stooped down to pick up his hat.  Settling it on his head, he moved closer again, gesturing wordlessly for Jensen to lead the way.

They went.  Neither of them said a word.

Cougar walked too close all the way back to Jensen’s hotel, but if he was clinging then at least Jensen was doing the same, his hand tight and proprietary where it had locked onto Cougar’s wrist once more.  Cougar, in turn, was pressed up along Jensen’s side, so that every move they made brushed against each other.

Jensen kept sneaking glances at him, maybe just to look, maybe to reassure himself that Cougar was still there.  Cougar caught him every time, but only because he couldn’t bring himself to look away at all.

The door clicked shut behind them in Jensen’s hotel room with a solemn sort of finality, and Jensen broke them apart so that he could lock the door.

Then they were just looking at each other, separated by a few feet that suddenly felt like miles.  They had been kissing just a few minutes before, but suddenly Cougar felt uncertain of his welcome, enough to keep him from just closing the gap again like he so desperately wanted to.

“So, hi,” Jensen said at last, into the almost awkward silence.  “How—how have you been?”

Cougar shrugged, noncommittal.  It had been a long year.  “You?”

“I’ve been—I’ve been better.  Shit, Cougar, what are we doing?”

Cougar didn’t know.

“Last time I saw you, you were bleeding out, and then a fucking bomb went off,” Jensen said, looking at him, just looking.  “Where have you been, man?  What have you been doing?”

“The hospital, for a couple of months,” Cougar said, his hand drifting up almost unconsciously to his chest, where he knew there were two bullet scars.  He forced it back down with an effort of will and didn’t pretend not to notice Jensen tracking the movement.  “Followed your trail for a while, but I lost it after Alaska.”

“Alaska,” Jensen said slowly.  He tipped his head back toward the ceiling.  “Of course.”

It wasn’t really an interruption, so Cougar kept going.  “I almost caught up in Europe,” he said, and his lips kicked up into a wry half-smile.  “Thought I saw you in Spain, but you disappeared.”

“Fuck,” Jensen said, eyes blowing wide.  “I spent one day in Madrid, had to bug out and head for Italy instead.  You think you were there?”

That clinched it.  “ _Si_ , I was in Madrid, too,” Cougar said.  “After, I tracked Pooch down instead, let him get me to you.”

The look on Jensen’s face shifted immediately to indignation.  “ _Pooch_ knew you were alive before I did?” he said, outraged.  “And he didn’t tell me?  I’m going to kill him.”

Cougar shook his head.  “You are a difficult man to track,” he pointed out.

“Yeah, well, that was kind of the point.  You _died_ ,” Jensen said, and his voice cracked.  “There wasn’t supposed to be anyone left who I’d want to find me.”

 There was nothing Cougar could say to that.

“Fuck,” Jensen said, raw.  “I can’t believe you’re here.  You’re alive.  Seriously, am I hallucinating?”

“No,” Cougar said, and took an involuntary half-step towards him.

“Are you sure, man?  Because this is insane.  It’s unbelievable, it’s—it’s fucking Seussical, is what it is.  You know— _The Cat in the Hat Comes Back_.”

Cougar took another step towards him, this one with intent.  “Jake,” he said.

“Because you’ve even got the fucking hat, Cougs,” Jensen continued, full-out rambling now.  His eyes were tracking Cougar like he was waiting for the car to crash, waiting for the other shoe to drop.  “If I wake up and I imagined this, or I dreamed it, it’s going to fucking kill me.  I’m going to lose my goddamn mind.  I’ll—I will actually die.”

“Jake,” Cougar said, and took that last step forward.  “I’m not dead.”  With one hand, he tugged down the collar of his shirt, enough that the first of the bullet scars—a lurid red, knotted thing—was visible.  Jensen sucked in a startled breath, and went quiet.  “Even I don’t know how.”

Jensen made an aborted move towards the scar.  “Can I—” he said, his fingers twitching, and Cougar nodded and leaned forward, until Jensen’s outstretched hand was a mere inch away from the scar.

His fingers were cool and dry, and they brushed so lightly over nerve-deadened skin that Cougar almost couldn’t feel it at all.  He shivered involuntarily, leaned into the touch.

Jensen closed his eyes and swallowed hard.  “Not a dream,” he said quietly, almost to himself.  He must have been able to feel Cougar’s pulse under his hand—that particular bullet had passed far too close to Cougar’s heart.  “Fuck.  I missed you, Cougs.”

Cougar needed—something.  Needed to _touch_ , needed to shake them out of whatever strange grey area they had reached, where neither of them felt precisely real and even Cougar was starting to doubt that he had survived—

But he had, he _had_.  Jensen was right there, and there was nothing stopping him from lunging forward, from wrapping himself around Jensen as much as he could and just breathing him in—so he did, his hat falling away for the second time that night.  Jensen let him, which was even better, and immediately brought his free arm up to crush Cougar to him in return; his other arm was trapped between them, but there was no way Cougar was going to let go long enough for him to free it.

There was a year’s worth of words waiting on his tongue.  He pried his mouth open and let them free.  “I had to do it,” he said, low and fast and hard, and pressed together like this he couldn’t see Jensen’s face and Jensen couldn’t see his, but he could feel the way Jensen tensed up all at once, like a string being pulled taut.  “The bomb was for them, for the _angelitos_.  I had to finish it, Max had to die, and I’m not sorry.”  Jensen made a sound low in his throat and tried to pull back, but Cougar wouldn’t let him.  “But I lied to you, and that was for me, because I wasn’t letting you die with me.  It was the only way you would go, and I’m not sorry for that either.”

“Cougar,” Jensen said, like it had been punched out of him.

“Living, though, that was for you,” he said, which wasn’t exactly right.  “No, that’s not—I lived for me, but it was _because_ of you.  Two bullets to the chest—I was going to die.  It would have been easy.  I _wanted_ to die.  Do you understand?”

“No, I don’t—”  Now Jensen sounded stunned, a little horrified.  “ _Cougar_.”

For a genius, he could be unbelievably dense sometimes.  “ _Te amo, idiota_ ,” Cougar said, thinking about bombs and Max and that last hopeless rush, trying to drag himself to his feet despite everything, despite the certainty that he was bleeding out, ounce by slow and agonizing ounce.  Jensen choked out a laugh, tilted his head down and tucked it against Cougar’s neck.  He could feel dampness against his skin—Jensen was crying again.  Maybe he was too.  “I love you, so I’m not dead.  _Lo siento_.”

Jensen was definitely crying.  Cougar wasn’t entirely sure who was holding who up, but they were both clinging, practically trying to inhabit one body, and it wasn’t a sexual thing—not that there would never be sex, hopefully—just an affirmation, a reminder of life.

Later, there would be more complete explanations, for both of them—Jensen would tell Cougar about the last fifteen months, and Cougar would take off his shirt and show Jensen his new scars.  Later still, they would sleep together—just sleep, bodies curled up around each other and clinging, limbs tangled and foreheads pressed together so they could both see that the other was still there.  In the morning, Jensen would wake up first and Cougar would still be there, sleeping, _breathing_ , and maybe he would really start to believe that it was true.

He could have survived on his own, but he didn’t have to.

Maybe there would be sex then, careful and intense in turns, but for now Cougar just clung to Jensen and felt Jensen cling to him in return, and figured everything else could wait.

“I love you too, asshole,” Jensen said, and lifted his head so he could press a kiss into Cougar’s hair, his temple, down to the corner of his lips, careful and reverent.

“I know,” Cougar said, and reached up to kiss him properly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So everyone and their uncles have written a fix-it for this, but as soon as I finished the comics I knew I'd have to throw in my two cents worth as well. There'll be one more fic in this series, and then I'm calling it complete. Hope you enjoyed!


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